Will UberEats revolutionise the food home delivery business?

THIS bacon and potato gem breakfast burrito could be in your hungover little hands within 10 minutes on a Sunday morning. Who wouldn’t love that?

MANY people can identify with the frustration of ordering home delivery, and then waiting for ages wondering where on earth your large Aussie-with-pineapple pizza got to (don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it).

Well it’s looking like ride hailing service Uber could change the food delivery game with its UberEats app, which has expanded in 10 US cities this week (including Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and San Francisco).

UberEats is an expansion of a lunchtime-only service the company began offering within its regular Uber app in a dozen US cities last year.

• UberEats currently delivers lunchtime food in 10 minutes or less, and you can track the progress of your delivery (just as you can on the regular Uber car service app).

• You don’t need to have cash handy (as the money is automatically deducted from your linked credit card) and you can share the cost of a meal with a group with the fare split feature.

• There’s a flat delivery fee regardless of the number of meals your order, which will make it an attractive option for groups of office workers (though some people ordering individual meals have complained that the current service fee is a little hefty).

• One way they’re planning on keeping turnaround time down is by having customers meet the messenger on the footpath to receive their meal … which could be a real downer in bad weather.

• There’s a new menu every week that gives a couple of options for each day, with many of the offerings coming from buzz-worthy award-winning restaurants. Today residents of San Francisco can request baked treats from Salty Sweet (touted as the “greatest cookies in San Francisco”), a chicken tikka masala burrito or a sushi platter from an award winning Japanese eatery for their lunch. On Sunday residents in LA can order a bacon and tater tot breakfast burrito (!?) that can be in their hungover little hands within 10 minutes.

Hopefully the UberEats app will eventually arrive in Australia.

As an article in the Wall Street Journal notes, one potential challenge will be converting Uber drivers into delivery experts: “Delivering food creates new challenges for drivers, who have to get out of their cars to pick up the food from a restaurant, quickly shuttle it to their destination and sometimes park illegally while they wait for customers to appear at the curb.”

Not everyone is thrilled by Uber’s foray into the food delivery service. As Mashable reports, GrubHub (the billion-dollar publicly traded food delivery company that includes popular service Seamless), saw its stock fall by 5 per cent in trading Thursday to an all-time low following the news as analysts noted that Uber is now working on their turf.

Sadly, Uber Australia says it has “no current plans to launch UberEats in Australia”. But presumably if the new service is a success overseas it will eventually roll out Down Under (on its website, Uber currently lists an opening for a general manager of UberEats in Paris.)

New research released today shows that as a nation we certainly have an appetite for home delivery.

Menulog.com.au surveyed more than 2000 Australians and discovered that eating out at restaurants is viewed as too much effort, with over half of us (51 per cent) preferring to order in than eat out because of the process required to leave the house.

Getting out of doing the dishes is also a key motivator, with 54 per cent saying they order home delivery so they don’t have to wash up.

Originally published as Will UberEats revolutionise the food home delivery business?